Establishing pricing for certain services, such as wholesale telecommunications services, involves the analysis and consideration of massive data records. Wholesale telecommunications services refer to those services charged to retail carriers to carry call traffic between an origination (the caller) and a destination (the one receiving the call), or over some part of the path between the origination and the destination. Retail carriers are those carriers that interact directly with a customer. In some instances a retail carrier also provides wholesale services. Nonetheless, often, a retail carrier does not have a sufficiently expansive network to connect a customer's call without the call traveling through one or more other networks. Wholesale services refer to those services charged to the retail carrier in order to connect the call to its destination, or carry some part of the call.
A wholesale provider may establish prices based on the destination of the call, based on the retail carrier for which the wholesale carrier is carrying traffic, and other factors. A retail carrier may employ a least cost routing (LCR) model that uses price, among other factors, in determining which wholesale carrier to use to terminate (carry or connect) any given call. Initially, the LCR may select the least expensive wholesale carrier to terminate a call. Often, however, the least expensive carrier cannot handle the call volume, quality is insufficient, or other factors suggest a different carrier should terminate the call so the LCR may select a different carrier until it successfully terminates the call or otherwise hands it off to a wholesale carrier.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.